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Submit tv pilot12/25/2023 ONE PARAGRAPH OF TASTY DESCRIPTION SETTING OUT THE WORLD: This is what your Producer/Commissioner will keep referring to in your conversation about the drama and its future development. You need to convey the main narrative here – the set up, the jeopardy or challenge for your protagonist and to give a sense of style and tone by the way you word this. In a small paragraph a cluster of lines 3 – 6 maximum (otherwise it’s a pitch paragraph, not a logline!) summarise your idea as succinctly and entertainingly as you can. Here in your treatment you state how long your series or serial is x 3/4/6/8 parts or is it a series of 13 or more parts? LOGLINE: For example: ‘Shetland’ ‘Doctor Foster’ ‘My Big Fat Teenage Diary’ ‘Peaky Blinders’ ‘The Unforgotten’. A core cast of returning characters and an over arching storyline, but in this case the storyline is ultimately resolved. Serial: A drama of more than two parts with a strong serial element. There may be several stories per episode which are resolved, but the series storyline, that which is carried by the core returning cast, remains open.įor example: ‘Call The Midwife’ ‘Coronation Street’ ‘Downton Abbey’ ‘The Unforgotten’ ‘Holby City’. The backdrop remains the same and is returned to each week. These are the definitions that describe my working day and most of my television career in drama production. Sometimes it’s better that the title describes what’s in the tin, so to speak eg: ‘The Bodyguard’ or, to take an example of a show for CITV that I Produced ‘My Dad’s A Boring Nerd’. Make yours really sell your idea by being the best you can make it. Here is my easy to assimilate, Go To approach to writing the definitive tv Treatment. I write about this and lots of other writing related things in my book Writing for Television Series, Serials and Soaps but I will add the condensed elements of what makes a great Treatment and how to write one here. Do not write a word unless it holds its weight. Remember – we are cash rich but time poor. Any more and we are getting into short film territory and that is not where Producers of tv want to be. The Treatments I help my writers write are all under 10 pages. And often, the first thing I talk to my writers about is the Treatment of their idea. Writers come to me not only to help fix the script they’re stuck on, but to also raise the bar of their writing in general. Now, I work with writers one on one via my Script Consultancy. I have worked with many, many writers throughout my career, as a Script Editor on EastEnders, amongst other great long runners and then as a Producer of Holby City and other popular series formats. There’s so much going on here: the characters, the world they live in, the story itself and are you actually saying something that people will want to engage with? How do you highlight the bits that are working in your tv idea and those that aren’t? Is there enough story? What are you actually trying to say? How do you control all these elements? You’ve had a brilliant one which has to be for television – there’s a series here you know it, but the sheer weight of the story, the abundance of characters, the complexity of this world you are creating is overwhelming.
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